Imagine an episode of Morecambe & Wise scripted by Plato and you've got a decent idea of Gustave Flaubert's last, unfinished novel. I read this book years ago and remember mostly being struck by its quite broad humour. Re-reading it, the seriousness, and slightly overwrought quality of the learning displayed within, seems more prominent.
One of the things I like about Flaubert is that he never wrote the same type of novel twice: Madame Bovary is a melodrama, Salammbo a historical romance, Sentimental Education a bildungsroman, and the Temptation of St Anthony a piece of experimental theatre. Bouvard and Pecuchet is a satire, of pretty much every aspect of 19th century life.
The structure is extremely formulaic. Bouvard & Pecuchet are low-level clerks in Paris who strike up an instant, profound friendship; Bouvard inherits a sum of money from a distant relative, and they use it to retire to the Normandy countryside; they use their idle time to pursue every branch of knowledge they can find. After the introductory events, the novel follows them as they dabble fruitlessly in agriculture, science, history, literature, politics, love, philosophy, religion, and education.
It moves from slapstick early on - as their attempts at scientific farming come up against the brute realities of nature and their venture into landscape gardening produces tasteless monstrosities - to a more serious mood as they start taking up mental pursuits. Flaubert seems to have been pretty serious about examining, and challenging, most varieties of knowledge through the thoughts of this pair; indeed, at times it feels that there is so much learning on display that the spirit of the book flags.
In many ways, it resembles Erasmus' Praise of Folly more than anything else. Bouvard and Pecuchet start out as boobs, justly mocked by a society that includes the author and reader; but gradually, they become prouder and more critical, and you sense that Flaubert is using them to scold contemporary mores. A pair of fools, they end up exposing the folly of bourgeois society rather than their own; their endless curiosity and openness to new ideas distinguishes them from the self-satisfied provincial characters who surround them.
On the other hand, it's hard to see where this curiosity comes from. It doesn't seem to have been present in their lives until they retired to the country, and in that sense it feels that Bouvard and Pecuchet are really just ciphers for the comments Flaubert wants to make about contemporary life and thought.
That, I suppose, is why the book feels less successful when it moves to intellectual life: the ideas start to subsume the personalities, and you start to feel that the author was pushing through the stack of reference books on his desk in the face of writers' block. In parts their friendship is genuinely touching, but character perhaps wasn't Flaubert's strongest suit as a writer.
So: well worth reading if you like Flaubert, and the first three or four chapters would appeal to anyone; but you can see why he was having such trouble finishing it. Flaubert's control of tone and style is one of his greatest assets, but here it feels like it's got out of hand. The close structure of the book prevents it from really taking wing. By all accounts, he was only about a chapter away from finishing, but the novel would only be able to resolve itself properly if Bouvard and Pecuchet had real personalities which had developed over its course. You can't really kill off your characters if you've never quite brought them to life.
No comments:
Post a Comment